I started this creative group of moms, Mothership HackerMoms, last year amidst Sean’s cancer and Magenta’s birth as a way to stay sane in a crazy time. Now, 9 months later, this group has opened a sweet little hackerspace at 3288 Adeline, Berkeley 94703, around the corner from Scarlett’s preschool.
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The 1,000 hackerspaces across the world are awesome techy guy spaces. But as the first women’s hackerspace ever, we’re making history. We are here to support moms who are creative or want to be. I know personally how mothers like us are especially starved for time, freedom, community. So we offer $5 childcare and a kid-friendly 24/7 member space where little ones can learn and witness their incredible, hacking, entrepreneurial moms in full glory.

Are you a HackerMom or know one? If you’re local, visit our weekly open house on Wed mornings 10am-12pm or Thurs nights 6-8pm or during workshops. You’re also invited to our bubblicious, hula hooping Grand Opening Benefit happening May 26-27, where you can come chat, play or just stuff our donation bra! If you’re not local, we’d love to hear what you think of this venture.

Do you have a MacGyver-like penchant for creating art and science projects out of LEDs, beer bottles, and rubber bands? Can someone look at your photography or paintings and instantly tell that you were a child of the 80s? Do things that glow in the dark, light up, shoot electricity, and scare your neighbors titillate your senses? Does the macabre spectacle of a circus sideshow entice you? If so, denhac has an event for you…

Hot Pants-Making Night at Vancouver’s VHS

Some people have round asses and some people have flat asses. If you’ve never been able to find a pair of hot pants to fit your very special ass, this hot pants party is your chance to learn how to customise some hot pants!

WHAT: Bring a pair of your own booty shorts / tighty whities / underwear to use as a pattern. If you own large scissors, bring ‘em. We’ve got fabric for up to 10 ten people, so please RSVP to cnorberg at makerfaire.ca to secure your spot, or bring your own fabric.

The event is Monday, April 18th at 7:30pm.

Pumping Station: One Celebrates its 3rd Birthday

Ok, three years ago in a coffee shop not far from here, Pumping Station: One was just a dream in the heads of a bunch of DIYers who had no idea what they were in for. Come celebrate our 3 year anniversary!

Come check out the awesome hackerspace we’ve built and some of the cool projects we’ve made there.

The cost is $20.

LVL1’s White Star Project Update

Louisville hackerspace LVL1 hosts the White Star Balloon Project, a huge undertaking that aims to float a balloon across the Atlantic jet stream. In a project update from late last month,

We have been fairly quiet publicly, but many subsystems are coming to completion rapidly, including the helium gas overflow vent valve. Completion of anything flying on a ballon means it’s time to do some science! Tests must be done, data must be noted, hypotheses checked. Gary Flispart and I put together a detailed technical video explanation of the vacuum leak test system we’ve made.

Hackito Ergo Sum Hacker Conference
The HES Conference is being held April 12-14 in Paris, France:

Hackito Ergo Sum will try to anticipate the short term global challenges of 2012 by taking a deep dive into the findings of security researchers around the globe. Previous editions featured entirely new talks such as hacking Scada networks (including satellites!) using X25, new kernel pool overflow exploitation techniques (Tarjei Mandt won the pwnie award 2011 at Blackhat for this amazing research he first presented at Hackito Ergo Sum 2011), reverse engineering of FPGA firmwares, dynamic forensic analysis of malware using either direct RAM access or using emulation (PandoraBochs), fuzzing of virtual machine monitors at interrupt level, hacking Telco Operators at the scale of a country using the SS7 protocol, and GSM security through femtocells for instance.